Walking for Food

I've been in Hobart for twelve days staying with my friend Glen, attempting to put together a first draft of all the chapters I've been working on over the past thirty months that constitute my doctoral research work, 'Walking for Food' (working title).

While at Glen's I was able to forage in his local neighbourhood. I brought to our table rosemary, figs, mallow, dandelion, hawksbeard, apples, feijoas, fennel, borage flowers, stickyweed, rosehips, crab apples, and up on Mount Nelson high above the suburbs I came across the one fungus I saw in hobart, the curry punk (Piptoporus australiensis), which I consumed only as sensory delight. Walking and foraging helped me loosen up my sedentary studious body, but I also resorted to quick break outs in Glen's apartment overlooking the Derwent River.

Arriving back in Melbourne yesterday morning I wandered once more disappointingly into The Age while I waited for a cup of tea and read another stupid article on foraging. Will the bourgeoise please take a plate of death caps now. Actually the article was not really on foraging at all but on secreting, privatising and selfishly capitalising on the autonomous food commons. Arseholes!

Photo: Meredith O'Shea

On my last night in Hobart I was a guest speaker at a dinner-debate titled 'Eating Wild Fungi: Fun or Foolhardy', an event that was part of a national symposium of mycologists and fungi enthusiasts that aimed to generate more awareness of the important role mycelium plays in life production. I wrote this little number while at the symposium.

At the dinner I was on the affirmative team with Tasmanian food writer Graeme Phillips and my friend Alison, a photographer and fungi educator who I've been doing an informal apprenticeship with while helping her out with the brilliant workshops she runs. We argued for a return to commonsense and self-accountability, not the continuation of the nanny state. Naturally I found this debate a platform to critique anti-ecological society, its estrangement due to a lost connection with food. We won!

Then after the dinner I hooked up with Glen for a final bash at Hobart nightlife, and headed to the Brisbane Hotel to see the FUN FUN FUN world of the 5678s. They were very cheap, cool and mingled with the common mycelium after the show. I had a chat with bassist Akiko Omo about all things punk, fungus and Hobart.

My love and gratitute to Glen for a wonderful time, and who shot this final peg as an encapsulating image of an awesome journey, at once intellectual and biophysical; metaphoric and metabolic; theory and practice; fun and fungi.

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Island of Love

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With further apologies to Blake

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Interspecies love (kind of)

Our band played last night and I had the pleasure of singing Blake's The Fly (1794), which I set to music a little while ago.



Bunch of Bandits, Glenlyon General Store. Thanks for filming Primo!

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Progress Capitalists – What will they think of next?

Image: EcoWatch.org

Published on Thursday, April 5, 2012 by Common Dreams USGS: Recent Earthquakes 'Almost Certainly Manmade' Report implicates oil and natural gas drilling, aka fracking.

A US Geological Survey (USGS) research team has linked oil and natural gas drilling operations to a series of recent earthquakes from Alabama to the Northern Rockies.

According to the study led by USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth, the spike in earthquakes since 2001 near oil and gas extraction operations is “almost certainly man-made.” The research team cites underground injection of drilling wastewater as a possible cause.

“With gasoline prices at $4 a gallon, there’s pressure to rush ahead with drilling, but the USGS report is another piece of evidence that shows we have to proceed carefully,” said Dusty Horwitt, Senior Counsel and chief natural resources analyst at Environmental Working Group. “We can’t afford multi-million-dollar water pollution cleanups or earthquakes that could pose risks to homes and health.”

Read on here.

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WWOOFing on country (a postcard from Summerfield)

Jaara elder Uncle Brien Nelson and his partner Jude Perry welcomed Zeph and I into their home last week to WWOOF.

Early on the first day we walked from our home to the bus and travelled to Woodend.

We then took a Swan Hill bound train to Eaglehawk station and had some time to wait there before being picked up by Jude.

On reaching Summerfield we came across a stand of scar trees.

Jude told us Jaara people used the bark to make canoes and

coolamons (carrying vessels) without killing the trees.

We arrive at Jude and Uncle Brien's and find a garden full of Indigenous spinach.

It was hot working in the sun and by the afternoons we needed to cool off.

Uncle Brien worked with us during the day and on one afternoon came down to life guard.

Our days were spent working around chooks, horses and dogs. We built some fences and we took some down.

During the week we shared skills, knowledges, meals and plenty of jokes.

Thank you Jude and Uncle Brien for a wonderful week.

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